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Jörscengsclúúxell
General information Jörschungsclúúxel has elements of both an agglutinative and a fusional language, but primarily an agglutinative, the primary (possibly sole) fusional element being the ubiquitous vowel changes in verbs and words formed from verbs. It has a relatively large phoneme inventory, especially for vowels, and also for fricatives. Most notably it has free word order (not that any words can go in any order, only that subject, objects, verbs, prepositional phrases, etc. can go many places and are not bound by orders such as SVO, SOV, V2, or VF). Spelling conventions are still being worked out, so many of the spellings of words may change. Phonology Consonants ʙ͡v is a labiodental trill, a sound without a dedicated IPA symbol and which seems not to be found in world languages despite not being too difficult to produce, that may be somewhat fricated. p͡f is essentially not a true labiodental affricate, as in German. Vowels Alphabet The language is generally written the Latin alphabet. Diacritics over vowels make separate letters. There are a few digraphs and trigraphs. The letters "y" and "q" appear only in loanwords. There are no silent letters. Acute accents and macrons over vowels are interchangeable, although acute accents are at this point more standard. Vowel length is signified by doubling vowels. ä = a â = æ á = ɑ a = ɐ b = b, p c = ç d = d, t ë = e ê = ɛ é = ɤ e = ʌ, ə f = f g = g, k h = h ï = i í = ɯ i = ɪ j = ʝ k = kʰ l = ɮ, l m = m n = n ö = ø ô = œ ó = o o = ɔ p = pʰ q = kʰ r = ʀ s = s t = tʰ ü = y û = ʏ ú = u u = ʊ v = v, f w = ʙ͡v x = x, χ y = i, ʝ, y, ʏ z = z, s In addition, there are the following digraphs and trigraphs: ai = a͡ ɪ au = a͡ʊ bf = p͡f dh = ð, θ ds = t͡s dsc = t͡ʃ ea =e͡ɑ gx = k͡x ll = ʟ̝, ʟ̝̊ oa = o͡a oi = ɔ͡ɪ ng = ŋ qu = kʰʙ͡v sc = ʃ th = θ Phonotactics Most any sound can come anywhere, with a few exceptions. Massive consonant clusters are essentially obligatory, partially due to the limited amount of vowels that will actually form distinct verbs as opposed to other forms of the same verb, and often occur anyway in nouns and adjectives not formed from verbs. Final obstruents are devoiced. χ tends to come at the end of syllables, and x at the beginning, although there can be some variation. Both of those are contrastive with ç. l occurs only in the syllable nucleus, and ʟ̝̊ and ʟ̝ only occur after. Glottal stops are inserted before word-initial vowels and in vowel hiatuses (i.e. in loanwords). Syllables tend to be closed, but nowhere near exclusively. Phonemically voiceless plosives are always aspirated. Grammar Nouns Nouns are heavily declined, but the way they are declined is complicated. Only the case and sometimes the gender are shown in the noun itself. Otherwise, the number and "definiteness" as well as the case and gender are shown by determiners. Determiners are necessary for all nouns except some proper nouns (i.e. personal names). There are seven categories of "definiteness" shown by articles, Indefinite (a, some) Definite (the) This/these That/those What Which Any/all (this is not quite an exact correlation to anything in English, but this class of article would be used before "grass" in "grass is green in spring" or "house" in "I do not own a house") No There are three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter (possibly better described as neuter/common) and the default gender to use for people with unknown or unspecified gender is neuter. There are five cases, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vocative. The vocative is only used to directly address people and things, and not in phrases like "What are you doing?" However, the vocative is very important for non-indicative phrases. Phrases such as "let it snow" would have the subject in the vocative, and "it would snow" would have the subject in the nominative, and the verb would look exactly the same. Verbs There are basically only two tenses, present and past. There are also two kinds of participles, present and past. There are two moods, the indicative and the non-indicative. The difference between imperative and subjunctive is shown by what case the subject is in, or the common absence of a subject for imperative phrases (see Nouns). Syntax The language has free word order. However, there are some basic limits. Articles have to go before or after nouns, unless there are adjectives in-between. Adjectives cannot go on the outside of an article of an article-noun pair (i.e. one can say "the big house" or "the house big" or "big house the" or "house big the" but not "big the house" or "house the big") The article in a genitive phrase always must go between the genitive noun and the noun it is referring to. Prepositions are the default, but some adpositions can be both prepositions and postpositions, most notably "of" with a pronoun (i.e. "mine of the car" -- "the car of mine"). Vocabulary Important words not listen in the word list: jórsc = "to be" Numbers: 0 = Zaicdsc 1 = Ois 2 = Bfúúd 3 = Dscrëëd 4 = Dsaud 5 = Slaiv 6 = Pocd 7 = Lüsct 8 = Gruusc 9 = Gxild 10 = Tüüll Example text Category:Languages